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How Much Is This Old Thing Worth?

By HELEN ROGAN December 30, 2015 1:16 pmDecember 30, 2015 1:16 pm

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

My mother said the book would be valuable one day. Her only regret was that over the years of reading it to me and my sister, she had been careless about pulling it off the shelf and had torn the delicate red leather of the spine. Still, it was a first English edition of “Winnie-the-Pooh,” dated 1926. Slim, soft and well loved, it was the copy she had had as a child and when she died, she left it to me.

I read the book many times over to my son when he was little, relishing the familiar feel of it in my hand and the memories it conjured up, and then I put it away. Covered in butcher paper to protect it from sunlight, my heirloom sat securely on the shelf for years until just recently, when a fit of downsizing zeal coupled with a desire for some ready cash led me to peer urgently around our house in search of items to sell. I was thinking about books in particular because our local bookstore was hosting an evening, complete with a single bottle of wine, at which people could show an expert books they thought might be valuable. What the hell, I thought, let’s see what Winnie is worth.

My mother would have been fine with this. She was not in the least bit sentimental about stuff, and she got real pleasure from chucking our childish scribbles and school reports — “too much clutter!” She was pretty bracing in general. When she told me that I would inherit her platinum and diamond engagement ring, she added, “Because, darling, I doubt you’ll be getting diamonds any other way!”

Channeling my mother, I marched off to the bookstore. Twenty or so people had shown up with high hopes and their treasures in tote bags. One by one, we diffidently presented our items to Heather, the charming expert, telling her about their provenance. “Provenance,” I learned, is an all-important term in the collectibles universe, since it refers to the object’s origins and history, both of which help to define its value. “Yes, indeed,” Heather said as she tenderly handled my book, “it is a first edition.” Excellent.

It was downhill from there. The book did not have its original slipcover — huge problem! — and, just as important, even in a pristine state it would be far less valuable than its predecessor, “When We Were Very Young,” the A. A. Milne poems in which Winnie appeared for the first time. That one had scarcity value because so few copies had been printed. In short, my book wasn’t worth anything to the kind of serious collector I was wistfully imagining.

But I wasn’t done yet. Back home, I started poking around on eBay and realized that a garden-variety collector might be willing to shell out a few bucks for the book — maybe even in the low three figures. My Winnie was, after all, rarer than the average bear.

So should I sell it? On the one hand, why not? The cash could give me and my husband a couple of fancy dinners out. Our only child, poor fellow, would probably appreciate me striking one chore off the ever-lengthening list called Stuff You Could Possibly Sell for Good Money After We Die (If You’re Smart About It).

And yet. I’ve hung on to the most unprepossessing family relics because they evoke memories I’d be sad to lose. My father’s ancient Wellington boots that he wore for fishing and gardening (he had small feet, so they fit me). A hideous ceramic pot bearing a groovy ’60s design and the word “Brillo.” My mother loved it. I even have an item that is fondly known as “Uncle Thomas’s Stump Sock.” And that’s exactly what it is — a sock that a beloved, if resolutely taciturn, uncle wore to cushion the stump that remained after his leg was amputated in the Second World War. He had some spares — spare socks, I mean — which over the years have proved to be invaluable oven mitts. This is the last threadbare but serviceable survivor. Obviously it’s precious, right?

Not to my mother, who would have found my devotion ridiculous.

Don’t get me wrong. She was loving, but tough, and for good reason. Born in Singapore in 1921, she never knew her mother, who died in childbirth. Because her father could not take care of her, she was raised by her aunt, alongside a couple of cousins. From the age of 5 she attended boarding school in England, as did so many colonial-era children. There she is in the school photograph, a doughty little thing, smiling in the middle of the front row, with a mass of blond curls and her school tie tucked neatly into her pleated skirt. Years later, she told me she became almost a mascot at the school — so young and pretty, so bereft — and she knew the strength of that.

She found her way through many “character-forming” experiences — becoming a lonely, young mother in wartime, raising three daughters, one with serious disabilities — by building on the resilience and stoicism she’d learned as a girl. It gave her an odd kind of freedom. She trusted herself and her opinions; that was that. Life was too uncertain to get too attached to things or mince words when the truth would serve.

If she knew how much I was obsessing about the book, she would probably say: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Helen, just get on with it! Sell the thing!” I’m smiling to myself, imagining the brisk exasperation in her voice. That’s a memory I don’t want to lose. Provenance, you know.